…did anything interesting happen last night?

POLITICS FOLLOW… beware!

Obamacare Repeal Flames Out In The Republican Senate

Incredibly, it was John McCain who wound up being the vote to end this latest round of “repeal and replace”.  The same John McCain who was brought in hastily from surgery (and diagnosis of having brain cancer), to supposedly be the vote to bring this over the hump.

However, yesterday, Senators McCain and Lindsey Graham gave what I thought was a pretty bonkers news conference where they talked about what a farce the “skinny” repeal bill was and how Mr. Graham, in particular, was reluctant to vote for it unless assured it wouldn’t be passed by the House “as is”.

Mr. Graham: If you feel the bill is a farce and don’t want it passed, then don’t vote for it.

Which, in the end, is what Mr. McCain did.

Though very much liberal in much of my ideology, for many years I’ve felt Mr. McCain was a Republican one could at least reason with.  In more recent years, I have to be honest, I felt he was losing it.  The presidential race against Barack Obama saw him nominate Sarah Palin for the VP role, which in my estimation was not only a stupid move but probably played a big part in his eventual loss.

It’s been said “Obamacare” will eventually fail.  I hear this is an exaggeration.  I also hear that many of the states that have the biggest problems in this era of the Affordable Care Act (which is the proper term for Obamacare), have problem because they didn’t want to implement the full extent of the ACA’s provisions.

I don’t know.

What I do know is that I experienced Canada’s “socialized” medicine… and it was freaking great.  I’ve experienced some of Europe’s socialized medicine as well, and frankly, it too is great.

I don’t like this Darwinian system we’ve had up until the ACA.  I don’t like the idea of people potentially going broke later in life or as a result of some kind of catastrophic medical need.

There are better ways to go and, sadly, the world outside our borders seems to have embraced this quicker than we have.

Perhaps with this later failure both parties will finally -finally!– get together and form a coalition that actually improves upon the ACA rather than trying to gut it.

Perhaps.